No nonsense guide to science

The No-Nonsense Guide to Science
Author Jerome Ravetz
Country United States
Language English
Genre Science
Publisher New Internationalist
Publication date
2006
Media type print
Pages 144
ISBN 1904456464
Website Preview on Google Books

The No-Nonsense Guide to Science is a book written in 2006 by Jerome Ravetz. The book is a short and readable critical account of today's techno-science. Written by the perspective of one of the fathers of Post-normal science the book argues for a deeper appreciation of uncertainty and ignorance in scientific knowledge and for a need for citizens’ participation in the appraisal of science when this is used in support or relation to policy.


Content

This book offers readable elements of history of science and of science and technology studies and puts them in the perspective of modern circumstances when science is increasingly called to provide guidance on human affairs and adjudicate policy disputes while at the same time being a major engine of change. The chapters in The No-Nonsense Guide to Science cover the following topics:

  1. Science now
  2. How science changed reality
  3. Second thoughts from history
  4. Little Science, Big Science, Mega Science
  5. Scientific objectivity
  6. Uncertainty
  7. Science and democracy
  8. People's science

This volume revisits many of the themes of Ravetz's major works such as his 1971 Scientific knowledge and its social problems and the 1990 The merger of knowledge with power: essays in critical science, as well as the tropes of Post-normal science. He repeats in this work his warnings against the "self-destructive tendencies of mega science" and the neglect of ignorance: "Curing the ignorance of ignorance is not merely a concern of enlightened educators. It is vitally important for science and survival." Like most of Ravetz's production this works takes on a new relevance in the context of the present science's crisis.

Reviews

For Jonathan Latham this book "focuses on what we can learn from the ongoing revision of this history. It argues that science was never objective or disinterested but that in the past this mattered relatively little since science was relatively powerless and less wedded to establishment interests. […] Ravetz offers the democratisation of science as a necessary and realistic antidote to the hubris and arrogance of science." [1]

Selected quote

"Paradoxically [...] the work of discovering the objective facts about the natural world has depended quite critically on the motivation, morale and morality of those doing the work [...]".

References

  1. Jonathan Latham (The Bioscience Resource Project), Review of: The No-Nonsense Guide to Science by Jerome Ravetz, June 4, 2008, The Independent Science News.
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